The overriding lesson of the Dexter Reed shooting is that when you shoot at — let alone wound — Chicago police, they will shoot back and not count the bullets.
The Reed shooting should put renewed attention on the priorities in the city’s police reform efforts. The primary, and much ignored, reasons for the Chicago Police Department’s problems are its poor hiring system and ineffective supervision and training. Individuals too often are hired and then promoted into leadership without the needed competencies and experience.
Transformative change for CPD requires infrastructure that ensures that only those who are academically prepared and psychologically qualified are hired and only experienced, accomplished and trained officers are promoted. In both cases, we need a comprehensive system of supervision and training at all levels and oversight that is unbiased and professional.
We can create a pool of high-quality police candidates by recruiting from high school military academies, ROTC programs and an upgraded Chicago Police and Firefighter Training Academy (CPFTA). The city now has six military academy schools and 37 high schools with JROTC programs. These schools should operate with curricular and co-curricular programming that recruits future police officers and first responders.
The CPFTA draws hundreds of students from all high schools who are interested in careers in public safety, law enforcement, criminal justice and fire safety. It should be expanded. The academy program could be upgraded to include public and private Chicago high school students interested in such careers. One underpromoted benefit is that CPFTA graduates are eligible to receive free tuition at the City Colleges of Chicago.
CPD can also remove obstacles for the transfer of highly qualified officers from other police departments. Hiring of veterans could be increased significantly. And CPD should create a reserve corps of retired and former officers with distinguished records who could be tapped for support roles and special events or be mobilized in a crisis requiring additional resources.
Chicago police could also create a new “exempt level” class of distinguished officers who could serve as police training officers. Priority must be given to filling existing exempt ranks and especially sergeant vacancies. Effective command and control and the consent decree require a 1-to-10 sergeant-to-officer ratio and that sergeants be selected based on demonstrated leadership, performance and training. The driver of professional performance is professional front-line supervision. It’s time for CPD to just do it.
The supervisory ranks should be supplemented by a new “exempt level” class of police training officers to serve as trainers, supervisors and role models for new probationary officers. These training officers must also be selected based on their record, training and experience, treated as sergeants in training and compensated accordingly.
Promotions in CPD must be earned, not based on politics. Officers meeting CPD standards should be promoted based on accumulated service and specific time in pay grade, as well as accumulated advanced training. Promotions must not be limited to a single, controversial and high-stakes test. “Merit” promotions should be frozen or limited to less than 10%, and only for officers on patrol or in field units.
Experience, accomplishments and additional training combined are the best criteria to ensure that those most qualified for promotion are indeed promoted. This is the best-practice promotion system the U.S. military uses, with great success. If you recruit high-quality candidates who reflect the community at the front end and promote based on time in service and advanced training, you will have a high-quality and diverse leadership corps.
CPD should also create a Command and General Staff School to guide police training, strategy and tactics. This school should be modeled on the best practices in federal leadership training schools. Consider the U.S. military’s war colleges, which not only guide military training, strategy and tactics but also provide the rigorous schooling required of soldiers before they can join the senior officer ranks.
The school would oversee training for police cadets. It would also design and implement leadership training programs to develop future CPD leaders to fill all the exempt ranks from sergeant and above. It would develop a training program for a new cadre of police training officers. And the school would provide required training for officials and personnel from the Police Board, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability and the public safety inspector general’s office.
Lastly, CPD needs effective accountability and oversight. COPA Chief Administrator Andrea Kersten’s stunning display of poor judgment in her recent comments about the Reed shooting remind us again of a fundamental problem that she and most COPA appointees have — a dangerous lack of understanding of what it is to be a police officer.
It’s time to professionalize police oversight and bring fairness and speed to the investigations of police officers. The city should consolidate police oversight — COPA, the Police Board, the bureau of internal affairs — under one board with police representation and investigatory expertise.
In summary, to be effective, CPD must recruit and train high-quality police officers drawn from the community, promote only those who have earned it and respect officers by consolidating police oversight. Without the right opportunities to “earn” the right to lead, officer morale and effectiveness will be adversely affected, and the public will remain rightly dissatisfied.
Paul Vallas is an adviser for the Illinois Policy Institute. He ran for Chicago mayor in 2023 and in 2019 and was previously budget director for the city and CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
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